Dems launch August healthcare defense

House Democrats have started to pick up the pieces on healthcare reform, but they face a difficult month at home defending their legislation to skeptical constituents.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday laid the groundwork for their defense. She blamed the health insurance industry and urged her members to do the same during their four-week break.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”

{mosads}Democrats on the other side of the Capitol joined the criticism. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has his own group of people to blame. He lashed out at the media for setting an August deadline.

Reid said reporters created a fictitious deadline of a successful vote by the August recess, and downplayed the fact that the chamber won’t meet that mark.

“That is a deadline that you created,” Reid told a group of about 75 reporters. “It’s not like we don’t have a product. Significant progress has been made … The mere fact that this wasn’t done by last Friday or by 5 o’clock doesn’t mean we’re not going to get a quality product.”

The House, which is scheduled to adjourn on Friday, did not get a floor vote on healthcare legislation and struggled to produce a compromise bill. But lawmakers were optimistic legislation would move out of the Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday. Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is scheduled to hold a marathon markup session to get the bill through his committee before adjournment.

Meanwhile, the Senate, which is scheduled to adjourn Aug. 7, is still waiting on the Finance Committee to present its bill. Chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Thursday that will not happen before recess. “It’s clear that there isn’t going to be a markup next week,” Baucus said.

Baucus and ranking committee member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) denied they were feeling any pressure from their leaders and said they would keep working in the group. “We have not been committed to deadlines. We’ve been committed to getting a job done,” Grassley said.

Reid blamed the GOP for the lack of an agreement. “The only problem with getting a bipartisan bill is the Republican leadership in the Senate,” he said.

And the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), joined Pelosi’s attack on the insurance industry.

Durbin specifically took aim at the insurance lobby, which he said will “pour it on” during August recess.

“There are people out there with a lot of money at stake in this debate,” Durbin said. “The health insurance companies are some of the most profitable businesses in America. By fighting change they’re protecting their bottom line.”

Several lawmakers have expressed concern on how to sell healthcare reform to constituents over the break. And many interest groups have begun running attack ads in vulnerable members’ districts.

Piling on top of those worries was the fierce pushback from the progressive flank of the Democratic caucus, which cried foul over what it described as a Blue Dog-driven watering-down of the “robust public option” advocated for by Pelosi and Waxman.

“We have a letter signed by 53 Democrats saying they will not vote for a bill that does not contain a robust public option, and there are way more members than that who believe what we believe,” Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, said at a Thursday afternoon rally-style press conference called to flex their own muscles.

The deal the Blue Dogs made Wednesday cut $100 billion from the bill’s price tag. To lower the bill’s cost, Waxman agreed to loosen the employer mandate so that it covers businesses with payrolls of $500,000 or more, instead of $400,000. Rates on the “public option” will not be tied to Medicare, but negotiated separately, as private insurers do.

And that action sparked the fury from the liberals.

But the leadership did try some positive spin.

“Not having a vote is not all bad,” said a Democratic leadership aide. “Now all of our different members can go home to their different districts and talk about whatever they want to talk about.”

Blue Dogs returning home to their conservative districts can trumpet the fact that they put the brakes on a healthcare bullet train, an especially important accomplishment after having seen a climate change bill that played poorly in many of their districts rushed through the House and smack into a dead end in the Senate.

And liberals can return to their homes and declare that the fight is far from over, especially for a strong public option to compete with the private healthcare industry.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) did not go quite as far in advocating for the benefits of having different sets of Democratic talking points for different districts, but argued that a month at home meeting with constituents will build overall Democratic momentum for healthcare.

“For members, this is a win in this sense; They will now have the opportunity to go home and say to constituents, ‘This is why this is good for you,’” Hoyer said. “We’re going to come back with increased momentum to get this done.”

{mosads}To that end, Democratic leaders developed a singular August messaging strategy centered on attacking the insurance industry.

“Our message is simple. It is now being echoed by the White House,” said a recess memo obtained by The Hill and sent to all Democratic members. “And it counters the Republican ‘government takeover’ message.”

With tempers worn so thin on their biggest campaign promise, perhaps the best thing Democrats have going for them is getting all of their members away from one another for five full weeks.

“I hope these people are looking at their constituents. Are they the Blue Cross Dogs, or what?” shot Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) at the progressive press conference.

J. Taylor Rushing and Mike Soraghan contributed to this article.